THE CASE FOR EXPLORATORY SOCIAL SCIENCES: how social science lost sight of the future and how it can recover its confidence

Summary

Should the social sciences only analyse the past and present? Or should they also try to help design the future? Here I make the case for new ways of organising social science, both in universities and beyond, through programmes of ‘exploratory social science’ that would help to generate more options for addressing the big challenges that lie ahead. I discuss:

· how 18th and 19th centuries social sciences often fused interpretation and prescription, including radical design;

· how a series of trends — including quantification and abstraction — delivered big advances but also squeezed out this capacity for radical design;

· how these same trends also encouraged some blind alleys for social science, including what I call ‘unrealistic realism’ and the futile search for eternal laws.

· how counter trends, including rising awareness of evolutionary dynamics, systems models and complexity, have created new spaces for thinking about design

· how broader conceptions of design that address structural conditions and how they can be changed, relate to narrower, more incremental social science that takes existing structural conditions as given.